This week, I chat with Todd Shutts, Senior Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Balance Innovations, about evolving retail to support cloud services, speeding up infrastructure upgrade roll-outs, and the smart way to utilizing public cloud.
Balance Innovations offers a unique retail currency management software platform. How does your team help the company stay at the forefront of retail innovation?
Balance Innovations delivers a cloud service platform to help retailers transform their currency operations. We overhaul traditionally manual tasks (store-level reports done in Excel and delivered via fax) into actionable data insights for a retail executive to increase efficiency and performance. We drive transparency into currency management, and when retailers can see it, they’re able to act much faster.
My team is chartered with helping the organization build product, from tactical to long-term strategy. Over time, we have evolved our product delivery mechanism to cloud services.
How are you evolving IT to support this business transition?
To develop product that is easier to consume, deploys more quickly, and with fewer roadblocks, we have built cloud native systems on infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service technologies. Continuous integration and delivery, with a focus on DevOps, are key drivers of this new product delivery model.
Tell me about your decision process in selecting Rubrik as your new de facto data management platform.
The more time my team can spend on delivering an exceptional solution, the more value we can provide our customers. We used to spend a lot of time managing a cumbersome and outdated data protection architecture that comprised multiple software and hardware solutions. We are pretty keen on technology that enables engineering to deliver services seamlessly and found that in Rubrik.
What type of savings have you seen with Rubrik?
Once we started using Rubrik, we achieved significant time savings by eliminating the time spent at the backup and restore process and rolling out third-party solution upgrades. If the wheels flew off in upgrading third-party software, getting it back to a consistent state was time-consuming. Now with Rubrik, if we encounter upgrade issues, we can quickly roll back and begin the troubleshooting conversation with the vendor. As a result, we have cut our time spent by 80%.
How are you using Rubrik to orchestrate data within a hybrid cloud environment?
One of the key drivers behind our implementation of Rubrik was its data orchestration capabilities for a hybrid cloud environment. As we evaluated new technologies to modernize our data protection infrastructure, we noticed that no other vendor aside from Rubrik gave us the capability to push to public cloud. We use public cloud as an intelligent archival target and can pull back data at a granular level with instant global search.
What type of role do you see Rubrik playing in the near future as Balance Innovations evolves its cloud service platform?
We run systems in a hybrid cloud environment. If we experience some type of DR event, we see Rubrik as a path to restoring these systems in the public cloud. From a capital and time perspective, this poses significant savings. Rubrik’s product vision coincides nicely with how we are evolving our business.
Download the case study: Balance Innovations Transforms Retail with Rubrik Cloud Data Management